Bette Midler & Idina Menzel: Oscars Underwhelming Iconic Songs

So, okay. Let us start with the Divine Miss M, who was self-effacing on the red carpet and then rather well-dressed in vertical stripes during her performance. Even though coming at the end of the In Memoriam segment can be a tricky place to be, Bette knows that that song lifts up everyone’s hearts and there won’t be a dry eye in the house, so she gears up to let it fly.

Except that it didn’t, exactly. The performance of that song was, let’s be honest, um, not where we thought it was going, right? Despite everyone jumping to their feet at the end? There was a bit of, you know, discussion in our room about exactly what might have caused that song to be less…singable than it used to be. Age? Lack of practice? The problem is that we all wore out our cassettes and have every breath memorized, so deviations – and there were many – are now detrimental to our understanding of the song.

But maybe it was something in the acoustics of the room, or the temperature in there, because Idina Menzel was also not very good, which is sacrilegious of me to say. You can send the anthrax to [email protected] - but come on! It may have been that she was thrown by being introduced as Adele Dazim but it sounded to me like she hadn’t warmed up. Like her throat was tight and she was straining. Sometimes this can happen to singers if they haven’t had a chance to warm up in the place they’re performing – like if her dressing room was small and moist and the theatre was cold and dry…? I also read on Twitter that some Frozen fans thought the tempo was way too fast and that’s why it didn’t sound, um, you know. And she knew, too. You could tell on her face.

It’s hard to be a usually-flawless singer on the biggest night of the year sometimes. #PoorBetteAndAdele may not be the hashtag we want, but it might be the hashtag we need.